Josef Fritzl's change of heart: remorse or calculation?

Interesting insights from the Times OnLine about what is motivating the Austrian monster -- and monster he is -- they seem to see the same possible "deal" I saw yesterday evening ...

Josef Fritzl's change of heart: remorse or calculation?

Josef Fritzl has capitulated in the face of the mass of evidence presented against him and confessed to murdering one of his children, fathered in an incestuous relationship with his daughter.

The admission stunned the Austrian court. The 73-year-old building engineer had confessed earlier this week to raping his daughter Elisabeth, imprisoning and beating her, and committing incest. But he had denied murdering the baby, born as a twin in 1996, and the charge of enslavement.

"What made you change your mind so suddenly?" asked the judge, Andrea Hummer.

"The video testimony of my daughter Elisabeth," Fritzl replied in a gruff voice. "I accept my guilt in all the charges presented."

Yesterday the court had heard almost all of the 11 hours of pre-recorded testimony made by Elisabeth soon after her release last year from the dungeon where she was kept for a quarter of a century.

Elisabeth chronicled the abuse and humiliations that she suffered during those years: the rapes – about 3,000, by some calculations – the birth of seven children with nothing but a pair of rusty scissors to cut the umblical cord, the damp, the deliberate power cuts, and the hunger. Fritzl may have concluded that his daughter – whom, according to the court psychiatrist, Adelheid Kastner, he considered his one true friend – actually hated him.

It was not just the family in the cellar that feared him. Elisabeth's brother, four years her senior, also testified by video tape yesterday that even the relatively privileged children upstairs could not stand their father, who regularly beat them into silence.

Intriguingly, one newspaper, Kurier, claims that Elisabeth was in the courtroom during the showing of the video testimony. She reportedly sat silently at the back watching her father and then left through a side door. If this is true – a court spokesman would not confirm or deny the story – it may have tipped the balance for Fritzl, offering proof that he had lost his family.

Until this morning Fritzl's defence strategy seemed clear. He would contest the most serious charges, and if convicted on the lesser charge of rape could expect, with good behaviour, to be free in seven and a half years, sooner if time on remand was taken into consideration.
But that would make sense only if he had a family to return to after his release.

Since his arrest after the dungeon was discovered in April last year, Fritzl has been much concerned with his finances. He owns seven properties, including the "House of Horrors" in Amstetten, which at current values could fetch about € 2.4 million (£1.7 million).

If found guilty he will have to pay all the therapy and treatment costs for his family, the 24 years of lost earnings for his daughter and legal fees. That comes to more than € 3.5 million. He and his lawyer, Rudolf Mayer, had hoped that he could plug the gap by selling his life story, but there appear to be legal problems with this too.

So, last night, Mr Fritzl's world collapsed. An early release would project him into the world as a bankrupt pariah shunned by his family.

Better, he may have calculated, to cut his losses and hope that the court refers him to a psychiatric clinic for the rest of his days – a gentle retirement for an un-gentle man.

The court was therefore treated to the theatre of regret. Symbolically, Mr Fritzl no longer hid his face while entering the courtroom. He came ready to apologise for his deeds, hoping against hope that it would make a difference.